At last! At long, long last we were able to set off on our first ‘real’ 4x4 trail! Hawk and I had set time aside a couple of months ago to drive the Addo 4x4 trail but aborted due to heavy rain. So here we were at last and it was a perfect summer’s day.

We spent the night at the Addo main camp and left the gate at 6.30am for the 2 hour drive to Darlington Lake where we planned to do the trail from.

Ahead the mountains we were going to be crossing.

Darlington Lake

Last edited by DinkyBird on Thu Dec 07, 2006 8:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's difficult for me to accurately evaluate this trail because of my rather limited off road experience. I wouldn't attempt it without a difflock, or low ratio, but perhaps an experienced off roader could manage without either. It's a long slow dirive over a bumpy surface, but it's not at all difficult. The track is narrow with fairly steep inclines in a number of places. Low ratio 2nd gear provided enough braking on most descents with 1st only needed occasionally. I tried a few steep inclines without difflock, but couldnt make it. There again perhaps with more experience I might have used a better approach and managed, but I was itching to use our newly fitted rear axel lock, so I used both rear and centre locks. Gave me a lot of pleasure to feel the wheels grip and the old Landy cruise up the hills. On second thoughts I don't think it could be done without a difflock.

Fortunately the weather was perfect and the track dry, otherwise it could have been a very different story. My biggest concern was how we would pass any oncoming vehicles. I wouldn't have liked to reverse down some of the steep narrow areas. We did pass two vehicles but fortunately both were at fairly wide areas. (A Sanparks bakkie and another Landy from CT) This over a six hour drive.

The river was flowing fairly strongly and is rated level 5, so we thought it wise to leave that for the future. All in all a great place for a beginner to get some practice.

Great stuff, DB, looks like amazing scenery and lots of interesting plants I'm not JB, but that cool plant looks like a variety of euphorbia, possibly either Euphorbia coerulescens (which is similar to a huge houseplant that I have) , or perhaps Euphorbia resinifera?

Absolutely amazing how many different (and different looking) plants turn out to be euphorbias — google searches can be very enlightening!!